Please join us for the next gathering of the ‘Exhibitions: Histories, Practices’ research group at Central Saint Martins. I am delighted we will be able to share film footage of the first Stars exhibition (Beijing, 1979) and a performative lecture reflecting on the curatorial historicisation of The International Art Exhibition of Palestine (Beirut, 1978).

Victor Wang will share his research on a pivotal moment in Chinese exhibition histories: the 1979 and 1980 Stars Exhibitions (星星画会). Accompanied by documentation, the presentation will consider the importance of the public sphere and civil resistance with the beginnings of a contemporaneity in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Victor Wang (王宗孚) is a curator and exhibition-maker based between London and Shanghai. Most recently he was appointed the K11 curator of the travelling and collaborative exhibition between Palais de Tokyo and K11 Art Foundation, ‘Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant’ at the chi k11 art museum, Shanghai. Victor is also a Curator in Residence at Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF): a knowledge platform initiated by and built around the collections of four contemporary art museums in Flanders, Belgium: S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), MUHKA & Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp).

Sakina Dhif and Rachel Pafe will present part of an ongoing project that examines the historically repetitive desires behind archival exhibition making. They will present the second version of a performative reading that will first be given at the PARSE Biennial in Gothenburg. Using an exhibition earlier this year at MACBA, ‘Past Disquiet’ (curated by Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri), as an entry point, they will discuss messianic time, archival impulses, haunting, withdrawal and the place of fiction in exhibition studies.

Rachel Pafe and Sakina Dhif are researcher/writers/artists based between London, Washington DC, Brussels and the floating world. Graduates of the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, they began to collaborate in 2014. Jointly they experiment in order to question the concepts of fiction, ghosts and repetition in fiction and academic writing. Sakina’s latest research looked at the Arab Image Foundation, in Beirut, Lebanon, to explore the relations existing between an art institution’s space, its collection and possible procedures. Rachel’s practice centers on iterative ideology, desire and associated politics, juxtaposing the mundane, absurd and ideal through the lens of messianism. She examines this within the exhibition format: through academic writing, fiction and a hybrid involving spoken word.

This is a gathering of the Exhibitions: Histories, Practices Research Group at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London